HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY
Today’s highlight:
On Feb. 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia, the influential conservative and most provocative member of the U.S. Supreme Court, was found dead at a private residence in the Big Bend area of West Texas; he was 79.
On this date:
1633: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition, accused of defending Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around. 1861: Abraham Lincoln was officially declared winner of the 1860 presidential election as electors cast their ballots. 1935: A jury in Flemington, New Jersey, found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-slaying of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-monthold son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Hauptmann was later executed.
1943: During World War
II, the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve was officially established.
1945: During World War II, Allied planes began bombing the German city of Dresden. The Soviets captured Budapest, Hungary, from the Germans. 1974: Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union.
1984: Konstantin Chernenko was chosen to be general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, succeeding the late Yuri Andropov. 1996: The rock musical “Rent,” by Jonathan Larson, opened off-Broadway. 2013: Beginning a long farewell to his flock, a weary Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his final public Mass as pontiff, presiding over Ash Wednesday services inside St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.
2017: President Donald Trump’s embattled national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned following reports he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia. Kim Jong Nam, the estranged halfbrother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, died after falling ill at an airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; two women are accused of killing him by smearing a nerve agent onto his face.
Ten years ago: A $787 billion stimulus bill aimed at easing the worst economic crisis in decades cleared both houses of Congress. Peanut Corp. of America, the Lynchburg, Va.based peanut processing company at the heart of a national salmonella outbreak, filed for bankruptcy.
Five years ago: Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland dominated her favorite event at the Sochi Olympics, winning the women’s cross-country 10-kilometer classical race despite skiing with a fractured foot; Japanese figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu won the men’s short program on a night that four-time Olympic medalist
Evgeni Plushenko retired from competitive skating. One year ago: President Donald Trump’s personal attorney,
Michael Cohen, said he had paid $130,000 out of his own pocket to a porn actress who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with Trump. Ahmad Khan Rahimi was sentenced in New York to multiple terms of life in prison for setting off small bombs in New York and New Jersey, including a pressurecooker device that blasted shrapnel across a New York City block; the attacks in September, 2016, left 30 people injured.